Part II

Introduction

How do we decide where to start a DevOps transformation in our organization? Who needs to be involved? How should we organize our teams, protect their work capacity, and maximize their chances of succeess? These are the questions we aim to answer in Part II of The DevOps Handbook.

In the following chapters we will walk through the process of initiating a DevOps transformation. We begin by evaluating the value streams in our organization, locating a good place to start, and forming a strategy to create a dedicated transformation team with specific improvement goals and eventual expansion. For each value stream being transformed, we identify the work being performed and then look at organizational design strategies and organizational archetypes that best support the transformation goals.

Primary focuses in these chapters include:

• Selecting which value streams to start with
• Understanding the work being done in our candidate value streams
• Designing our organization and architecture with Conway’s Law in mind
• Enabling market-oriented outcomes through more effective collaboration between functions throughout the value stream
• Protecting and enabling our teams

Beginning any transformation is full of uncertainty—we are charting a journey to an ideal end state, but where virtually all the intermediate steps are unknown. These next chapters are intended to provide a thought process to guide our decisions, provide actionable steps we can take, and illustrate case studies as examples.